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Citywide hosted an event for Melbourne business leaders, on Wednesday 21 November, on strategic innovation …

– TITLE:Â Innovation in Two SwitchesÂ – CONTENT:
In your business there are two major expenses: payroll and marketing. The strategic problem is how to get a much better return on these two major expenses.

– What if you could find an innovation switch that led to a ten times better return on payroll? – What if you could find an innovation switch that led to a ten times better return on marketing?

Business leaders in Melbourne will be coming to a breakfast meeting on Wednesday to find out about these two switches from Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson, a world authority on strategic innovation.

– INVITATION:
If you’d like to be considered for an invitation and you are a business leader, (a CEO or an executive decision-maker) you may RSVP.

“The World’s First Online School Since 1995”

Since it’s establishment in New York in 1979, School of Thinking has disseminated over a half a billion thinking lessons worldwide. It is also the first and oldest school on the internet and went online in 1995. Today, SOT lessons are exported,from Australia, to members in more than 51 countries … 24/7/365.

I’m Michael Hewitt-Gleeson, Principal of the School of Thinking which is the first and oldest school on the internet. I welcome you to this private institution of higher education for the public understanding and mastery of metacognition. Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime.

Since 1995 the lessons have been pro bono or free. There is a modest fee for the qualifying certificate.

The School of Thinking is free. In every sense of the word. Not only are there no fees for the training we provide but SOT also has an all-inclusive, swinging-door, opt-in/opt-out membership policy. Members come and go as they please. Anyone. Anywhere. Anytime. In 1995 SOT became the first online school on the internet. Our viral training strategy has always been train-the-trainer.Â We are the longest-running program in the world and have been training Thinking Instructors continuously since 1980.

– With whom is SOT affiliated?

SOT is free. It is an independent school. And so are the Thinking Instructors. SOT is not beholden to sponsors, government grants nor to fundraisers. We do not have to meet shareholders expectations. There is no cardinal, no censor, no imprimatur to tell us what we can say and what we cannot say. We use Wikipedia as our primary hyperlink resource for trainee due diligence and independent research.
We also use the feedback of our virtual campus to inform our daily publishing effort. As a primary resource for our members SOT provides the coursebook, the lessons and training and the certificate for those who successfully complete the training and we list them on our Roll of Instructors. After that, Thinking Instructors are on their own and free to think for themselves, to experiment and to operate as they please.

As you would expect, SOT is neither traditional nor authoritative and does not seek to dictate a sets of rules for members to follow. The model is darwinian. It is is laissez-faire.

SOT does not offer to provide or manage affiliate programs or online community fora. Thinking Instructors are free to use the SOT tools within their own networks to start, train and lead their own independent groups with families, businesses, schools and communities and according to their own levels of energy and initiative. SOT’s simple and robust design has proved to be a very successful model for long-term survival and with a less-inhibiting, faster and much wider spread of influence.

– How do SOT members stay involved?

Since 1980 we’ve published weekly SOT newsletters as a regular resource. We keep members and instructors supplied with a steady flow of hyperlinked information, research, resources and ideas. Instructors can repeat the training at anytime and also direct their students to SOT for online training 24/7. We have three levels of training. There are SOT members and Instructors in over 50 countries since 1980. They are operating in boardrooms and on the shop floor. They work in universities and classrooms. They are parents, friends, professionals and adolescents. There are now new cohorts of SOT Instructors in China, Italy and Brazil.

– If SOT is independent then who funds SOT?

The SOT Model was created by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson in 1979 and its design has been continuously evolved since then and privately fundedÂ by him with proceeds from his publishing, lecturing and consulting activities to business, government and academic institutions. We have maintained our independence for over 30 years and have been able to survive the rapidly changing environment during this time by using this simple but robust train-the-trainer darwinian viral replication model. We will soon evolve into the next 30-year phase, possibly with an IPO and a non-for-profit foundation. We are designing some different options to solve the longevity problem. Stay tuned! Â

30 years ago I had an idea. That idea was to start a Learn-To-Think Project to train 300,000 ‘teachers of thinking’ around the world. I shared this idea with Edward de Bono who suggested we call this project the Edward de Bono School of Thinking and so we kicked it off in New York in 1979.

This project was so successful that it has led to the largest program in the world for the teaching of thinking skills in families, classrooms and boardrooms.

Even in China they are now training ‘teachers of thinking’ because they are beginning to realise that China’s greatest asset may be the potential brainpower of its families.

In business in the 80s, CEOs like Jack Welch of GE were among the first to see the value of innovation which could come from the brainpower of GE’s knowledge-workers. Since then, other companies like Apple and Google have followed suit and developed employee brainpower to deliver extra value to their shareholders.

Over the years, this Learn-To-Think Project has published an evolving range of cognitive technologies including CoRT thinking skills, School of Thinking caps, universal brain software (cvs2bvs), English Thinking and the XIO memeplex.

In 1995 I put the School of Thinking (SOT) on the internet. This was the first school on the internet. It was also the first school ever to use hypertext – text with hyperlinks – as a teaching tool. We believe hypertext is one of the cleverest learning tools of the www era.

SOT began to send out millions of pro bono thinking lessons by email to students in over 50 countries worldwide and it still does this every day. Today we charge a modest fee. These brain technologies have reached over 100 million people worldwide since 1979.

Today the School of Thinking (SOT) is still run by Dr Michael Hewitt-Gleeson and is based in the Zen Tower, Melbourne. Melbourne is located in Victoria.

SOT is now the world’s oldest and largest program for the teaching of THINKING AS A SKILL. It is an online school whose mission is“Teaching the world to think”. There are two strategies for accomplishing this mission:

direct training online. It accomplishes this training goal through a series of daily emailed lessons, and

Members start off with The First Ten Lessons and then they may proceed to further advanced training. The training is designed to help each trainee to become a skilled thinker through daily practice in speed thinking, creative thinking, positive thinking, lateral thinking and new brain software.

This training is provided because it goes beyond judgement to design thinking. It helps to provide a balance to hard-edged, religious ‘critical thinking’–the 2,500 year old Aristotelian Logic and Platonic Truth which was exported by Europe, with missionary zeal, around the world during the last milenium and which so dominates Western thinking.

Today, thousands of SOT members in over 50 countries from diverse cultures, careers and age groups received their email lessons. Some surf the lessons on a superficial level, others wade through each one slowly and academically and, of course, there is every other kind of utility in between.

Like an intellectual smorgasbord, members take from the training what they are ready to take and they apply the brain software – neuroware – in their own way and on their own terms. Nothing is ever imposed on them, however, each individual member does get his or her lesson from Michael every single day!

SOT training changes lives.

In 1979, SOT originated the strategy of not just teaching thinking skills but training ‘teachers of thinking’ which has became the world’s largest movement for the teaching of thinking in schools.

In 1983, SOT originated the method of using ‘thinking caps‘ for the teaching of thinking skills of which Edward de Bono wrote in Six Thinking Hats: “may well be the most important change in human thinking in the past 2300 years”.

SOT also originated the concept of ‘brain software’ for the teaching of thinking skills worldwide and for raising innovation intelligence. The basic brain software taught by SOT can be stated in ten keystrokes as cvsx10=bvs and has been described as “the simplest idea in the world” .

SOT designed, built and operates the The Core Subject which is the world’s fastest platform for raising the innovation intelligence of an enterprise–a family, a school, a corporation or a city or a nation.

To opt-in and get involved go to www.schoolofthinking.org and enrol with your name and email address if you want to start getting your First Ten Lessons. You can, of course, opt-out at anytime.

The Golden Rule: Never share private information! Ever!

cvs2bvs universal brain software is a powerful cognitive switch: from cvs to bvs.

cvs2bvs is the killer app for doubling your speed of innovation.

cvs2bvs is the productivity solution for a better return on payroll.

–

JACK WELCH, CEO of GE used cvs2bvs as an enterprise solution to accelerate the transformation of GE from a 100-year-old slow-thinking monolith to a fast-thinking modern business with a growth surge of 4000% in shareholder value. He said, “cvs2bvs is the simplest idea in the world!” Jack understood the power of cvs2bvs as a killer business management app. He wrote: “I wish I had a management team that really understood the cvs2bvs equation because it is the value-added role in the management process”.

cvs2bvs is software for the brain which is based on The First Law of Thinking derived from modern cognitive science and our understanding of the differences in attention favoured by the two separated hemispheres of the brain.

The left brain favours inside-the-square thinking and the right brain enables outside-the-square thinking. The cvs2bvs brain app enables you to switch from left to right. From past to future. From inside to outside. From preferable to possible. From slow to fast. From good to better. From old to new. From cvs to bvs.

The First Law of Thinking is:

“the current view of the situation (cvs) can never be equal to the better view of the situation (bvs)”

or

“the cvs can never be equal to the bvs”Â

or

“cvs â‰ bvs”

The Second Law of Thinking is:

“the better view of the situation (bvs) can be ten times the current view of the situation (cvs)”

2. Give a specific example of how you deliberately used cvs2bvs in your own life to get a result? The more specific in terms of when, where, how etc the more useful will be your example.

Thirty-three years ago today, on 17 November 1979, the School of Thinking was founded in a meeting in New York between Michael Hewitt-Gleeson and Edward de Bono. From the first meeting in New York, SOT went on toÂ become the world’s biggest and longest-running program for teaching thinking skills to education, business and public sectors.

SOT has disseminated over half a billion thinking lessons since 1979!

For eight years (1977 to 1984) Dr Hewitt-Gleeson and Edward de Bono collaborated to launch a project to get THINKING taught in schools as a school subject.

This was the Learn-To-Think Project and was first published in their textbook The Learn-To-Think: Coursebook and Instructors Manual, ISBN 0-88496-199-0 which was co-authored by Hewitt-Gleeson and De Bono in 1982.

Their original textbook on thinking skills was featured as a cover story on all global editions of Readers Digest (article entitled Seven Steps to Better Thinking, April 1983) with a readership of 78 million readers in 70 countries and published in 21 languages. This global publication event was the widest ever dissemination of thinking skills and remains so to this day.

To advance this project they created and co-owned several corporate entities: Edward de Bono & Associates Inc, New York (1977), The Cognitive Research and Training (CoRT) Foundation Inc, New York (1983) and The Edward de Bono School of Thinking Inc, New York (1983).

In 1983 they developed The Six Thinking Caps method for teaching thinking skills. In the Preface of a recent edition of Six Thinking Hats Edward de Bono acknowledges that their thinking hats method “may well be the most important change in human thinking for the past 2300 years”.

In 1984, they agreed to separate their business partnership. Since then they have both independently operated successful programs for teaching thinking skills.

Dr Hewitt-Gleeson continued with the School of Thinking and remains Principal. In Melbourne, Australia, in 1995 he established the School of Thinking as the first school on the internet. In 2011 SOT lessons were sent out to members in more than 51 countries.

The first Chief Instructor and former Managing Director of the Edward de Bono School of Thinking in New York was Dr Eric Bienstock who is the current Vice-Principal of SOT. Eric is a pioneer of thinking skills in the US and is widely known for his “3-Minute Thinking Method“.

Dr George Gallup of the Gallup Poll at Princeton was Michael Hewitt-Gleeson’s mentor and Examiner for his PhD. He is singularly and permanently honoured as the Patron of the School of Thinking.

Dr Gallup said: “What the School of Thinking is doing, to teach people to think for themselves, may be THE most important thing going on in the world today.”